Runaways

by Carolyn McCrae

  “Why are you telling us this now?”

  “I saw him. The man. The Paki or whatever he is. He was here yesterday.”

  Linda shuddered. “Apart from being coloured was there anything else about him?” she asked very deliberately. “Was his hair long or short? What was he wearing? Did he speak well or with a heavy accent? Did you ever hear his name?” She knew who it was, so did Charles, but they needed confirmation to extinguish any hope that they might have been mistaken.

  “He was quite tall, but shorter than Charles. He spoke well, you wouldn’t have known he wasn’t English. He was well dressed, jeans but they were smart …”

  “And pressed with a clear crease down the front.” Linda finished for him.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I just know.”

  Charles looked down at Linda who had gone very pale. “Bill, can you leave us for a few minutes? Don’t tell your brothers for the moment. Don’t worry, we’ll tell them everything later. No secrets. We promise.”

  Bill skilfully turned his chair and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  “Do you think he’ll tell Al and Jack?” Linda tried to put off the moment she would have to accept that the man who had been her husband had been so close, had possibly spied on her, had watched her and was doing his best to destroy any happiness she had achieved.

  “Of course he will. But it doesn’t matter.” Charles understood her reluctance to face up to the inevitable but knew the name had to be spoken. “I wonder what Ramesh is up to?”

  “Why can’t he leave me alone?” Linda was close to tears, the pain of humiliation surfacing. It had probably not been buried too deeply.

  “Forgive me but I don’t think it is you he’s after. He’s undoubtedly behind the robbery and he will have told them exactly what to take and they will have given him what they stole. His interest in the family goes far beyond you, I’m afraid.”

  “So he has some pictures and books. So what? Why?”

  “He actually has probably got a lot more. Pod and Brickie got into Max’s safe, they didn’t break in, they didn’t force the lock, they knew the combination. Max said I was the only other person to know it and they must have heard it from me. They didn’t steal anything, they put a piece of paper inside which contained a message Max really did not want to get.”

  “A note?”

  “He didn’t say what it was, or who it was from. He just said it proved someone he hoped was dead was not.”

  “But why has Ramesh gone to such lengths to do that?”

  “I haven’t a clue, but I bet we’ll find out one day.”

  In the years that followed Charles thought many times about the last time he saw Max, every time he tried to explain to himself where it had all gone so wrong.

  They had been friends for years. Max had made Charles his heir, had always treated him as his son. Whatever it was he wanted to do with his life, whether it was writing and broadcasting about birds or setting up a business with Linda or marrying Holly, Max had always encouraged him. Their friendship had been tested at times, Max had secrets he wanted to disclose to no one and gradually Charles had learned some of them. Every time he had learned something there had been a temporary cooling in their friendship but, until the week after the robbery, their relationship had always been strong enough to survive.

  There had been no knock on the door, the police had not come to arrest the boys or even question them, but equally Charles hadn’t made any move to break up his home. Ten days after the robbery, during which time Linda’s nerve had been stretched to breaking point, Charles had driven to Sandhey determined to convince Max of Al and Jack’s innocence. He had to tell Max how Ramesh was involved and find out if Max could tell him why.

  Monika was silent as she had let Charles into the house, she didn’t welcome him with a smile and a kiss on both cheeks as she always had, even in recent months. She had nodded towards Max’s study and Charles had taken that as an instruction.

  They were never anything other than polite but it became increasingly obvious to Charles that Max was to be persuaded of nothing. Charles was a married man. Holly might return. Linda had to go, as did the children. Holly must be given the opportunity to return. It was insufferable to him and to Monika that Charles’s obduracy had led to their loss of Holly. Max’s anger was quiet and Charles knew it was genuinely felt but couldn’t help wondering at the extent to which Monika had influenced Max’s thinking.

  Charles had stood up when it seemed the conversation could not go any further. He had proffered his hand in a final gesture of mutual respect but Max had ignored it. “There will be many things you will regret in your life Charles. I’m very afraid that this conversation will be one of the worst mistakes you will ever make.”

  Charles always remembered the words as Max never made idle threats. People who crossed him or harmed people he loved had been imprisoned on what Charles knew were false charges, had died in what Charles knew had not been accidents or had simply disappeared.

  “In choosing that scum and that woman over your responsibilities and your history you have turned your back on me so I turn my back on you.” And he did.

  As Charles drove out of the gates of Sandhey, turning left to take the long straight road that ran alongside the golf course Charles was aware that this was the last time he would make this journey as long as Max lived. He would have to leave the town where he had lived all his life. His house would be sold, he would repay Max the money he had given him on his 21st birthday.

  Max had made him choose, and he had made his decision.

  “What about the bowmen?”

  “There’ll be other clubs, other groups to join.”

  “But we’ve all been getting on so well, and we’ve got so many friends there.”

  “You’ll make other friends. And you’ll probably meet up with them at competitions anyway.”

  The thought of leaving when they had been making such good progress had worried both Charles and Linda. They explained something of the reasons, leaving the children in no doubt that there was no choice. Once they realised the move was going to happen they all joined enthusiastically in the discussions about where they would go.

  “Somewhere nice…”

  “With a choice of cinemas, I’m fed up with only having one flea pit.”

  “The house has got to have a large garden, we’ve got to be able to set up the bosses and backstop netting.”

  “We’ve got to work out where the house is going to be first.”

  “This is impossible. We could go anywhere.”

  “It’s always more difficult to make a decision when there’s absolutely no restriction.”

  “Well let’s start listing things we want and things we don’t.” Ever the organiser, Linda firmly drew a line down the middle of a sheet of paper. “Right. Seaside? OK. No. we’ve done that and we want something completely different. Countryside or Town? OK. Town in the middle of countryside, or city? OK. Not city. North or South? OK. South.”

  It was Josie who achieved some focus in the discussion. “I’m going to be working in London. If you were within commuting distance I could live at home and that would be cheaper.”

  “Great that’s 40 miles from London, near a railway station.”

  “House prices will be cheap there then.” Charles could just be heard to mutter. He was not used to thinking about money and the knowledge that he would have to borrow to move to a house large enough for everyone in the most expensive area in the country did not make him comfortable.

  Living with Holly, he had never even thought that the income from his investments wouldn’t be enough to support them. The house was bought and paid for and their needs hadn’t been great. But things had changed since he had the children and there had been months when his expenditure was greater than his income. He wanted to pay Max back, at least something of what he had been given. He didn’t like the prospect of having to spend more of his capital in buying a new
house, reducing his income at the same time as his expenditure was likely to go through the roof. For the first time in his life, there was a need to think about, if not yet worry about, money. He was very conscious that the high interest rates that had caused Linda so many problems had been good for him.

  His depressing turn of thoughts was interrupted by Linda.

  “I know exactly where we should go.” She blurted out, surprising herself with the certainty. “We should go back to Kent.”

  Charles looked at her as if to ask how she could want to do that so she continued rapidly “No problem. Look, I’m going to have to do something, bring in some money, and there I know people who will help me do that. I know which are the best areas and which wouldn’t be good at all. It would be an awful risk to go somewhere completely new where we didn’t know anything. If we all moved to Kent we’d have a head start.”

  “It makes sense in a funny sort of way.” Charles sounded doubtful.

  “Look, Ramesh is thousands of miles away.”

  “Except when he’s here.”

  “Exactly. It doesn’t matter where I am does it?”

  And so, on the day that Susannah and Jonathan Smith returned from their honeymoon in India, it was decided that her brother’s disparate family would move south.

  Charles never saw Max again.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Susannah where the bloody hell are you?”

  Jonathan was home.

  “In here.”

  I was sitting at my desk working at the Personal Computer that had been my Christmas present to myself. In the two weeks since Jonathan had returned to work after the long Christmas and New Year break, I had been transferring all the information I had accumulated over the previous years from my old fashioned word processor to my new machine. It had taken two weeks but I had everything I had learned in a well labelled series of files in documents and spreadsheets in carefully organised directories. In the year since the wedding I had re-focussed on David, Max and Vijay and as 1985 began I was busy planning the next stage of my investigations. I would have plenty of time now as the Christmas round of socialising was over and I would not be required to be Jonathan’s ‘wife’ for some time.

  “I’ve got news for you.” Jonathan was slurring his words.

  “Yes?” I probably sounded as irritated as I felt at being interrupted. “Anything I might be remotely interested in?”

  “Probably.”

  “Terrific.”

  “In fact, darling girl, it might be the best news I have ever given you.” Jonathan’s sarcastic use of endearments always annoyed me.

  “When have you ever given me good news?”

  “I’ve been fired.”

  “Now that is good news.”

  “No notice. No nothing. Just no job!” He laughed and I realised he was drunk, or stoned, or both.

  I wasn’t going to ask what happened, I would wait for him to tell me in his own good time. He would eventually tell me if he wanted to and it only made him happier if I asked, so I waited for him to explain.

  “Pissed. I was pissed. I told the fuckers what they could do with their fucking job. They said I wasn’t going to make Partner. They couldn’t even wait ‘til fucking September. They said I was ‘unreliable’ so I told them where they could stick their fucking job. I went to the pub and went back and told them what they could fucking do. And they told me to fuck off. Well no, they didn’t actually,” he giggled inanely “they told me never to darken their door again, ‘begone’ they said, ‘leave, go, disappear, depart!’ So I fucked off.” And he stumbled against the settee and fell to the floor.

  I didn’t try to help him. I was thinking what his news meant for me. Our arrangement had only been for as long as he had the prospect of making partner, as long as he needed a wife for respectability. I had played my side of the bargain and had attended all the dinner parties and sporting events, operas and gallery openings that were part of the process of proving that Jonathan was the ‘right sort of person’ to be offered a partnership. I thought all along it was a lost cause but I went along with it so long as I had a place to live, someone to pay my credit card bills and the time to learn about David, Vijay and Max. Now I could divorce him, I had grounds enough, he would go back to New Zealand and I would be free to take up my own life again.

  At times I had let myself imagine what life would have been like if I had stayed with Carl. I wondered where he was, what he was doing, who he was with. What if we ever got together again? I had changed, perhaps I was readier now than I had ever been for a relationship with him. In moments of self-knowledge, perhaps too rare, I realised that he had tried to make a go of it, at least, at first. It was me that had failed, literally miserably, to make his life better. He still appeared, albeit infrequently, on obscure television programmes, his media career seemingly in decline. In the libraries I would look under indexes for ‘Carl Witherby’ to find that he hadn’t published anything recently.

  I hadn’t heard from the children, Linda or Charles, and there hadn’t even been a card from Maureen or from Ted the previous Christmas. I had made a point of writing them bright, optimistic letters, when I had got back from India. I had hoped Ted at least would have seen through the bravado and realised how much I wanted to hear from him. It had only been two years but it seemed forever since we had all been in touch.

  I made two mugs of coffee and gave one to Jonathan who had calmed down a bit.

  “Here, drink this, we need to talk.”

  Although he said ‘Yes, dear.’ I knew he wasn’t really hearing anything I said.

  “When are you going then?”

  He looked mystified. “Going? Whatchamean ‘going’?”

  “You’ll be going back to NZ.”

  He stood up, as if to go out of the door. “Of course. Gotta go home.” When he got to the door, one hand on the handle he turned back “Can’t. Can’t go home.” He looked at me and laughed “Gotta pack first. Can’t go home without packing. Pack pack pack pack pack.” He stumbled across the corridor and fumbled with his keys to lock his room. He turned round and held the keys out towards me grinning childishly. “Help Jonny?”

  I took the keys from him and went into my husband’s bedroom for the first time since the day before we were married. It was a very different me who, 16 months earlier, had left to meet his family at the airport, before going directly to the register office. The morning we had arrived back from India he had emptied all my things from the drawers and wardrobes and thrown them out onto the corridor and I had been happy to move into the spare room. The next Saturday a man came round with a tool box to fit a lock on Jonathan’s room so that even had I wanted to go in I couldn’t.

  It was a mess. There were t-shirts socks and underpants on the floor, his work suits were on hangers but not in the cupboard, they were suspended from the curtain rails. I couldn’t believe that a man, so fastidious in so many ways, could live in such a way. But then, I reasoned, he had hardly spent any time here.

  I went to open the cupboard but Jonathan stumbled to block the door in a melodramatic fashion. “Thou shalt not pass!” and when I turned to go out of the room without argument he moved away asking in his hurt, boyish voice “Don’t you want to see?” I knew if I moved towards him he would block the door again and laugh at my optimism so I carried on towards the door. “All my little secrets? Aren’t you the teensiest weensiest bit curious?”

  “No.”

  “Well I’m going to show you anyway!” He shouted as if he had won a great victory. “Here!” He had slid the cupboard door open and picked up a carrier bag which he threw vaguely in my direction. “There you are!” It seemed that that effort was all he could make as he collapsed on the floor. “Stupid bitch.” He looked up at me and around the room as if he had never seen it before and passed out.

  I took the bag and went to my room.

  It was full of envelopes. Most were addressed to me but at an address I did not recognise. The various ha
ndwritings were familiar, the dates on the postmarks regular throughout the previous months. Another packet, held together with a blue elastic band, were all the letters I had written and given to him to post.

  I put the bag in a holdall along with some clothes. I packed the papers I knew I couldn’t do without into my briefcase. I took the disk out of my new computer and poured the remainder of my coffee into the drives. I glanced swiftly around the flat to make sure I had everything that I really needed and left.

  I took a taxi to The Savoy. Without a second glance the concierge took my briefcase and holdall and ushered me into the foyer. In jeans and sweatshirt I was not dressed as their usual guests were but the hotel’s staff were well trained.

  Giving them a credit card I decided that Jonathan was going to have a surprise when he read his next statement, a river suite at the Savoy is not cheap. Nor was the limousine the hotel had arranged which waited patiently that afternoon outside various exclusive shops in Knightsbridge, Bond Street and Piccadilly.

  With a roomful of shopping bags I finally sat down in my suite, with a room service meal and bottle of good wine, to read the letters that Jonathan had kept from me.

  I didn’t recognise the address they had been sent to, I didn’t know anyone in Wimbledon. Perhaps one of Jonathan’s colleagues had agreed to have my post go to his address, perhaps Jonathan had another flat, another life. God knows he spent enough time away he could have had a mistress or even another wife and children for all I knew. Perhaps I was just the ‘work wife’. I thought the best thing was to sort the letters into chronological order as far as I could read the postmarks.